Windows 7 users can pin programs, files and folders to the taskbar for an easier way to interact with the items. Pinned items are always shown in the taskbar, regardless whether they are open or not on the operating system.
Recently I noticed a strange behavior that I could not figure out at first. Some pinned items in the taskbar would open right on their pinned icon, showing it as active from that moment on. Others however spawned a new icon in the taskbar, as if they were acting completely independent from the pinned item.
This was highly confusing, and I first thought it had something to do with pinned shortcuts who triggered this behavior. I took a closer look and found out that it was not the case. Firefox was linking directly to the Firefox executable on the hard drive and Chrome was doing the same. While a click on Firefox spawned a new item in the taskbar, a click on Chrome did not.
My next thought was that it maybe had something to do how the items were pinned on the taskbar. You know that there are different options available. It is for instance possible to drag and drop an item on the taskbar to pin it, or to right-click it in the start menu or while it is open as a normal item in the taskbar.
While I was not able to figure out what caused this odd behavior, I was able to find a fix for it. If you encounter pinned taskbar items in Windows 7 that spawn a new icon on startup do the following:
Unpin the original item, right-click the newly spawned item, right-click the program executable and select to pin it to the taskbar. Move the new pinned item to the location of the original item, close it and see if that resolved the issue. It did it for me.
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this will not work for all programs.
for example, if you pin the newly spawned icon for portable FF, or portable thunderbird, then it will break the functionality. this because it looses the information about the profile.
are you using portable version of FF by any chance. because for installed FF otherwise, it works fine.
regards
AK
Pinned items will never work properly with applications that use launchers (such as PortableApps’ suite of programs), but that’s a design issue and it’s unlikely to be fixed anytime soon.
Thanks for writing about this Martin, I had this issue and this was the first thing I tried, but I suspect others might have been left in the dark about this.
Akshay, it was an installed version of Firefox 4.
Worked for FF4, althoughI had to unpin and pin twice. Can’t get it to work properly with this ‘trick’ with FF5
Beautiful! It worked for me.
Thank you so much. Clever fix!
It worked for me as well. Thanks.
It worked, thanks so much for the fix!
You Rock!
WORKS FOR ME TOO! TY!!
Thanks for the tip, worked well. Typical sort of Windows glitch though, and it really annoys me! We pay for software to do a ‘seamless’ job – and it does not. We have to trawl the internet for fixes to problems, we should not have to! Rant over. Thanks again.
Can you help me consolidate files/folders on the start menu in Windows 7.
This quick fix worked great for Thunderbird 8. Thanks.
To circumvent the problem I found a more reliable tweak.
Before pinning a desktop icon with the spawning issue to the taskbar, I change the compatibility modus in properties to ‘Vista (Service pack 2)’
Works for me all the time.
I tried this:
I have a custom Firefox icon in my taskbar, I click it and another Firefox icon spawns (this spawned one has the default Firefox icon). I unpin the original (my custom icon) then right click the spawned one and pin it again. My custom icon appears but as another icon leaving me two icons: my custom icon and the default icon.
the glitch is mainly caused by the fact that when you upgrade your software, the pinned icon is still attempting to open the older version. this in turn tells the software to open the update software – thus duplicate icons.